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Films

Casablanca

Brian McCusker looks and leaps into Casablanca with Søren Kierkegaard.

Although Casablanca (1942) was an A-list film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to be anything other than just one of the hundreds of ordinary pictures produced by Hollywood that year. After all, the premise is fairly straightforward. A cynical world-weary man falls in love with a beautiful woman who restores his faith in humanity, then she leaves him: his belief that life is cruel is confirmed, and he regresses to a selfish existence. The woman reappears, they fall in love again; but this time he leaves her, for the greater good. However, that nutshell contains the essence of many philosophies – not least that of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Danish philosopher who many consider to be the father of existentialism.

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